Monthly Archives: August 2006

Things are good here. A new coffee shop just opened up a few weeks ago. Sign says "XXIV hours" which is cool. I've been there almost every day this week, chatting up all kinds of people. Seems the revolution is dead. Not from lack of wanting. It's just that nobody knows how to do it. Or they all have ADD and can't think about it long enough to concatenate words into sentences.

One was memorable: "If you throw gasoline on somebody who is not on fire, they are not going to get hotter because of it."

The master of personal internet presence is the top Matt on the internet: Matt Mullenweg. His business card instructs you to go to Google, type in Matt and click I'm Feeling Lucky. That button skips the results page and takes you to the top search result for Matt.

Today I checked my ranking for "Andy": #7 on MSN, #16 on Google, #23 on Yahoo!. That's not bad considering I'm up against Wachowski, Kaufman and Warhol.

For the "Skelton" search I'm #5 on Google if you ignore the duplicates and skeletons. Again, not bad considering I'm up against Ike, Red and John.

If you find any of this stuff interesting, you'll be interested to know that searches for my legal name, Andrew Skelton, are all dead ends. In just over two years I have solidified my identity as Andy Skelton in the largest public repository of human knowledge. I am sure it could have been done much faster by gaming the system or, less easily, by actually becoming famous.

Now the really interesting part: what if I also maintained an identity named Andrew Skelton who never hyperlinked to Andy, never appeared in the same places online, never hinted that Andy and Andrew were one and the same? Have I done this? ;-)